Leadership Agility Change Lab – In-house Program

Hands-on Leadership Agility Training

Does your company’s success depend on how well it responds to changing conditions? If so, your organization’s success depends on the effectiveness of your managers when leading the initiatives needed to change and improve the organization.

Research has shown that over 70% of organizational change efforts fail to achieve their desired objectives. Why? Because the change isn’t framed in a clear and compelling way, because the needed level of stakeholder support isn’t mobilized, and/or because improvements aren’t adequately tailored to fresh circumstances. Even for experienced managers, most of today’s change efforts have an urgency and complexity that requires a new level of “agile” leadership.

Participants Work on Real-time Change Initiatives

The Leadership Agility Change Lab is a 1-2 day program for managers at all levels. Based on extensive research and three decades of experience consulting to change leaders, this practical, hands-on workshop focuses on strategic, stakeholder, creative, and self-leadership agility – the four kinds of agility needed to lead change effectively.

Outcomes

Participants each bring an important change initiative to work on throughout most of the 2 days. Through specific feedback and coaching that increases their leadership agility, they leave with a rich action plan for a more “agile” and effective initiative.

Each participant also takes away a specific action plan for working on new, more agile leadership behaviors, thereby using their change initiatives as opportunities to accelerate their own leadership development.

In addition, participants leave with a set of key action-oriented questions they can continue to use on their own and in concentrated, high-leverage conversations with co-workers, which will increase their own agility and effectiveness, as well as that of the people with whom they work.

Finally, we work with our clients to set up easily-managed follow-through structures that help ensure that participants support one another in continuing to practice what they learn in the workshop.

This workshop can also be customized so that the group as a whole can work on specific issues it needs to address, such as agile team leadership or overcoming obstacles to more agile leadership within the organization’s culture.

Workshop Format

The Leadership Agility Change Lab is a highly interactive, “roll up your sleeves” experience that uses a new tool called the Leadership Agility Compass, along with focused peer coaching and a well-tested action workbook, to help participants apply leadership agility principles to their real-life initiatives throughout the workshop. Whether the Agile Change Leader Lab takes the form of a one-day, one-and-a-half day, or a two-day workshop, the general outline, which can be custom-tailored to your situation, is as follows:

What is leadership agility?

The workshop begins with a brief, interactive presentation on Leadership Agility, what it is and why it has become essential for effective leadership in today’s complex, rapidly changing world.

Three levels of leadership agility

Through a rich small-and-large group exercise, participants are introduced to three “levels” of leadership agility in a way that allows them to experience these levels from the inside-out. This exercise clarifies the practical consequences of leading from different agility levels when leading organizational change, leading teams and engaging in pivotal conversations.

Your leadership initiative

Participants identify their change initiative, the level of agility at which they usually operate, and the agility level at which they want to lead this initiative.

Context-setting agility

Participants answer key questions that help them frame their initiatives. Using a powerful set of peer coaching questions, they re-frame their initiatives to lead them more effectively and with a higher level of agility.

Stakeholder agility

Participants identify the key stakeholders of their initiative, determine where they need increased stakeholder support, and pinpoint “pivotal conversations” needed to build that support. They prepare for one of these conversations and get specific coaching on how they can approach it in a more agile and effective way.

Creative agility

Continuing to focus on their individual initiatives, participants identify the key problems their initiative needs to solve. Each brings their most important problem to a group of four, where they learn and use “creative agility” techniques to develop breakthrough solutions.

Self-Leadership agility

After a brief discussion about self-leadership agility, each participant develops a specific plan for working on new, more agile leadership behaviors while undertaking their initiative. Depending on the size of the workshop, they share the key points of this plan with the large group or their group of four.

Follow-through structures and commitments

Written evaluation

Closing

Additional Follow-through Services

A variety of additional, customized services are available to enhance follow-through and sustained application of the leadership skills learned in the workshop. These include the Leadership Agility 360, individualized coaching, team coaching, and more comprehensive action learning programs.

Comments from Participants’ Written Evaluations

Excellent! One of the best leadership training workshops I’ve ever experienced.

This workshop was much more productive than other professional training experiences. It was very useful and is likely to have more potent and lasting outcomes.

Use of a real initiative throughout the session make everything relevant, saved time, and will help me move quickly to apply what I’ve learned in the real world.

I learned the diverse skill-set, awareness and sensitivities needed for really effective leadership. Having a new leadership level to aspire to will help frame all my interactions moving forward.

The facilitators were very knowledgeable, clear, astute, and timely in their comments.

I will apply what I have learned more so than from previous leadership development workshops. Why? Because there is a valuable model underlying this workshop, and the workshop is designed in a way that really engaged me with this model.

I gained effective tools to elaborate a real vision for my initiative.

The “context-setting” exercise changed how I framed my whole initiative.

This is the best workshop I’ve attended in the past three years!

My key take-away from the workshop was an understanding of the Leadership Agility Compass and how to use it.

I learned new skills I can use in “pivotal conversations.”

What’s best about the workshop are the practical exercises for creative agility.

To me, the most valuable part of the workshop is the one-on-one “peer coaching” conversations with other participants.

I learned how to influence others to become more accountable.

I learned the power that can come from “self-leadership.”

The facilitators were very perceptive in their interventions and very respectful of everyone present.

I learned how my “power style” influences the flow of a meeting, and how I can step back and reframe during meetings to make them more effective.

What I valued most about the workshop was the “team spirit” we came away with.

The emphasis on “reflective action” will help me continue to apply what I learned in the workshop.

This is a great workshop! Extremely useful.

I recommend this workshop to all people who are in management roles and lead teams.

Our award-winning book, Leadership Agility, clearly describes the inner capacities and core competencies of highly agile leaders. With over twenty real-life stories, it also identifies the five stages or levels that managers move through to master leadership agility.

Written in an engaging, down-to-earth style, this ground-breaking book is designed as a roadmap that tells you how to bring increased agility to the initiatives you take every day — whether you want to improve working relationships, develop your team, or change your organization.

This 29-page white paper tells the story of an executive team that transformed themselves and their business by learning a new approach to high-impact conversations. It provides a detailed inside view of the learning process that takes place in our Pivotal Conversations Learning Lab.

The Leadership Agility white paper is essentially an executive summary of the book. It clarifies why agility has become essential to leadership effectiveness, outlines the levels of agility described in the book, identifies the four kinds of agility needed for successful leadership initiatives, and provides tips for increasing your leadership agility and helping others do the same.

The Leadership Agility Thought-Letter takes you beyond what you'll find in the book. It provides you with applications of Leadership Agility principles and methods that you can use every day, plus updates about Leadership Agility resources.